Frederick J. Vine is best known for his contributions to the theory of plate tectonics and has had a distinguished career as a geologist and geophysicist. Born in London, England, Vine was educated at Latymer Upper School, London, and St. John's College, Cambridge University. With his supervisor at Cambridge, Drummond Matthews (1931–1997), Vine did crucial work on the process of seafloor spreading.

The German scientist Alfred Wegener (1880–1930) proposed in 1915 that there had once been a super-continent, which he named Pangaea, that had slowly moved apart. However, Wegener's continental drift theory did not explain how such movement occurred, and was not well received. In the early 1960s, Harry Hess (1906–1969) hypothesized that seafloor spreading was responsible for the motion of the continents. In 1963, Vine and Matthews published a paper in Nature titled "Magnetic Anomalies Over Ocean Ridges." In this work, the two scientists...